As mentioned from last week’s update, the Simtopia team jumped headfirst into production last week and is gearing up for our halves presentation next week. Ultimately, we hope to come out with a working prototype that can showcase our experience as a whole.
Our team took considerable time in refining our design and sharing our project with additional ETC visitors.
This week, we had our project graced by the presence of Anthony Daniels, renowned actor of the Star Wars franchise and visiting professional at Carnegie Mellon.
Anthony Daniels plays Simtopia's space building experience on the Vive and delivers important design feedback on our change of perspective feel in virtual reality as well as finding purpose and goals for the guest to enrich their experience.
Additionally, our project was also visited by Activision which was extremely helpful for our game discovery project. We received feedback on our current prototype and was told ways that we can further make the development of the prototype interesting for the guest experience including changing the modules and shapes that guests can build with.
Employees at Activision visit the Simtopia testing room to give them important feedback on their design and experience. Seeing their perspective on user interface design was useful for further prototyping and development.
Furthermore, a lot Simtopia’s efforts this week was channeled into developing the prototype and experience more. Art and sound have been worked on while programming further iterated upon its framework. By continuing this process, we hope to integrate our assets for the following week that we will showcase for halves. Our progress for the week included but isn’t limited to the following:
- Design:
- Research on possible virtual reality interactions
- Received feedback from faculty and reviewed the design with the team
- Important design discussion with the team
- Design documentation update – Detailed interactions and motivation for Simimons and Robomons (which are the characters in the experience)
- Design documentation organization
- Art:
- Environment:
- Studied and researched unity shaders
- Implemented sky box shaders
- Flushed out a storyboard for Simtopia’s experience
- Art:
- Modeled out the robomon design
- Jumped into the UV and texture process while thinking about the rig setup for stretchy and flexible robot arms
- Further iterated upon the sculpt for the Simimon
- Added clothes for the space suit and a more defined form, thinking of retopology and design
- Modeled out the robomon design
- Programming:
- Implemented post connection detection
- Coded simple path finding artificial intelligence
- Environment:
With art, sound, programming, and design all underway – the Simtopia team aims to deliver a working prototype and strong presentation for the halves midway point for their client, Maxis and to showcase themselves at the ETC!
See you next week for the next Simtopia update!